Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

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There are innumerable books about Jesus. The reason is obvious: we can never finish with him, and every age must encounter him anew. Some of the many Jesus books are very good. Some are very bad. The bad ones are bad because they are far from understanding that the real “historical Jesus” cannot be grasped independently of faith in him. Which faith? That of the first witnesses and those who handed on the story, those who had to describe “accurately” or, better, “faithfully to the person” what had encountered them in Jesus.

Historical criticism is indispensable to research on Jesus. It illuminates the world in which Jesus lived, and still more, it works out the relationships among the sources of the gospels, illuminates the various layers of tradition, and thus sharpens our perception of what the evangelists wanted to say about Jesus in their “final text.” Historical criticism inquires persistently about what happened, and thus it demonstrates that Christianity is about real history and not about myths or ideologies. But when biblical critics measure Jesus only by their own prior understanding, deciding ahead of time what is “historically possible” and what is “historically impossible,” they exceed their own limitations.

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